<br><br>On Thursday, April 23, 2020, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<div lang="x-western"> Dammit, done it again!<br>
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Reposted, with correct Subject line :(<br>
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On 23/04/2020 00:18, Adrian Tymes wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 3:51 PM Ben Zaiboc
via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.<wbr>org</a>>
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">On 22/04/2020 18:39,
Adrian Tymes wrote:<br>
> agnosticism is a lack of belief in gods. Atheism
is a belief in the <br>
> lack of gods.<br>
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This is patently false. Agnosticism has nothing at all
to say about <br>
belief, it's about knowledge (from the greek, 'Gnosis',
meaning <br>
knowledge). Agnosticism is the position that you
don't/can't know.<br>
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<div>And thus, a lack of belief.</div>
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Not necessarily.<br>
Many religious people will freely admit they have no definite
knowledge about their particular god, but still choose to believe
in it. I know that's a logically contradictory position, but
belief knows no logic. In fact it rejects logic.<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Atheism, in it's most
common form, is the lack of belief in gods. Some <br>
people define a 'strong', or 'hard' form of atheism that
is an assertion <br>
that no gods exist, but that is a minority view.<br>
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These things are easy to look up.</blockquote>
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<div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<wbr>Atheism</a> <br>
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<div>"Atheism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of
belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly,
atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities
exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is
specifically the position that there are no deities."</div>
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<div>I guess both meanings are in use.</div>
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Yes. And one is overwhelmingly more common than the other.<br>
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When I say I'm an atheist, I don't want people to assume I
subscribe to a minority interpretation of the term (mainly
because, to me, it's not so much the non-existence of gods that is
the important thing, but the not believing in things ('believing'
as in accepting things as true without a shred of evidence, and
even in the face of contradictory evidence).<br>
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The narrowest sense is the one that needs qualification, not the
broadest one. This is true of job titles and many other things,
not just world-views.<br>
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</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>They're also definitions of God held by different religions or different believers which are scientifically consistent.</div><div><br></div><div>For example, God as the creator (consistent with the simulation hypothesis), or God as the "world soul" -- the collection of all conscious brings (consistent with open individualism), or God as Truth/Reality (consistent with mathematical realism).</div><div><br></div><div>It's easy to forget that there's any different religions and God's out there, as well as varying levels sophistications of belief, even within those religions.</div><div><br></div><div>There's no reason I see that religious ideas cannot be extended and grow together with advances in scientific understanding. To assume otherwise and say religious ideas must stagnate perverts and restricts not only religion but science as well.</div><div><br></div><div>Jason</div><div><br></div>